John White had waited three years for this moment. On August 18, 1590, he finally stood back on Roanoke Island, hoping to find his daughter, his son-in-law, and the granddaughter he'd never actually met. What he found instead was silence, an abandoned fort, and a single word carved into a post: CROATOAN.
That much was covered in the first part of this series. What happened in the hours and days immediately afterward is where White's story turns from disappointing to genuinely tragic and it's the reason the search for the Lost Colony effectively ended before it ever really began.
A False Signal
The search actually started before White's feet ever touched Roanoke's sand. As his ship approached the Outer Banks on August 15, the crew spotted smoke rising from the direction of the island, a promising sign, and one that gave everyone aboard real hope the colonists might still be there, alive and signaling for help.
The next morning, White and a small landing party set out in two boats to investigate. On the way, they noticed a second column of smoke rising further south and decided to check that one first, reasoning it might be an even more deliberate signal. It cost them the entire day. When they finally reached the source, they found nothing but a naturally occurring brush fire, with no sign that any person had ever been near it. By the time they gave up and turned back, it was too late to attempt Roanoke itself that day.
Tragedy Before They Even Landed
The next morning, August 17, the search party tried again, setting out for Roanoke in two boats. The weather had other plans. As they approached a treacherous inlet, a sudden, violent sea broke directly into the boat carrying Captain Edward Spicer, capsizing it instantly.
What followed was chaotic and horrifying. Some men managed to cling to the overturned hull; others were thrown clear and tried to swim or wade to shore, only to be beaten back down by successive waves. The boat itself flipped completely two or three times in the surf. Spicer and his steersman, Ralph Skinner, held on until they simply couldn't anymore, and both drowned within sight of the rest of the party. Four men who could swim reasonably well were pulled from the water by Captain Abraham Cooke, who stripped down and swam out personally with a handful of others the moment he saw the boat go over. In total, seven men lost their lives that afternoon, on a rescue mission that hadn't even reached its actual destination yet.
It would have been reasonable, after a loss like that, to call off the search entirely. White and the surviving crew didn't. They pressed on.
A Search in the Dark
By the time the remaining party set out again, daylight was already fading, and in the dark they overshot Roanoke's landing point by roughly a quarter mile. Spotting a light near the island's north end, they rowed toward it, anchored offshore, and tried to signal, blowing a trumpet and singing familiar English songs and hymns into the night, hoping for any answering voice from shore.
Nothing answered.
The next morning, August 18, they finally landed and found the source of the light they'd seen the night before: nothing but grass and a few rotting trees, smoldering on their own. There were no colonists waiting on the beach, no fires deliberately lit to guide anyone home. It was in this same landing, walking toward the abandoned fort, that White found the carvings covered in Part 1 of this series - "CRO" on a tree near the shore, and the full word "CROATOAN," carved deep and deliberate, on the fort's main entrance post. Neither carving showed the Maltese cross that would have signaled distress, which gave White real reason to hope his family and the rest of the colonists had left willingly, under no immediate threat, for a specific and known destination roughly fifty miles south.
The Storm That Changed Everything
White wanted to sail immediately for Croatoan Island to follow that lead. The weather wouldn't cooperate. A storm moved in almost as soon as the search party had regrouped, and conditions on the water deteriorated quickly enough that reaching Croatoan safely was no longer realistic.
The original plan, worked out with the fleet's captains, was to ride the storm out, then sail south to winter in the Caribbean before attempting Croatoan again once conditions improved in the spring. That plan fell apart too. During the storm, the ships lost anchors and had cables snap under the strain, leaving the fleet in no condition to safely make the long voyage south and back. With supplies already thin and the ships themselves now compromised, the captains made the call to abandon the search entirely and sail directly back to England.
White had traveled thousands of miles, lost seven men, and come within an estimated fifty miles of the answer he'd spent three years chasing. He never got any closer than that for the rest of his life.
A Letter That Ends the Story
White's voyage home was almost as brutal as the search itself, battered by additional storms, thinned by disease and dwindling supplies, the ship limped into port in Ireland on October 16, 1590, rather than making it back to England directly. White made his way to London afterward to meet with Sir Walter Raleigh, hoping to organize another attempt. It never happened in any form that got him back to Roanoke.
White spent his final known years living in Ireland, on one of Raleigh's estates near Kilmore, largely out of the historical record. The last confirmed piece of writing from him is a letter sent to the geographer and writer Richard Hakluyt in 1593, alongside an account of the 1590 voyage that Hakluyt would go on to publish. In it, White expressed something between resignation and quiet hope, entrusting the fate of "the planters in Virginia", his own family among them - to God's care, since there was nothing more he personally could do. No confirmed record exists of White ever seeing his daughter, son-in-law, or granddaughter again. Historians don't even agree on when he died; estimates range anywhere from 1593 to as late as 1606.
Raleigh Didn't Entirely Give Up
Sir Walter Raleigh, for his part, didn't abandon the colonists as completely as it might seem from White's own broken search. Raleigh later claimed to have funded as many as five separate voyages intended, at least in part, to locate the missing colony, though most of these were passing ships with only a secondary mandate to look for survivors, not dedicated search expeditions.
The most notable of these came in 1602, when Raleigh commissioned Samuel Mace to lead a voyage specifically tasked with finding the Roanoke colonists. Mace's expedition explored the Outer Banks region but never actually reached Roanoke Island itself, and returned to England having found no trace of the colonists, just as White had failed to a decade earlier.
By the time the Jamestown settlers arrived in 1607, some seventeen years after White's search, they'd been given explicit instructions to ask about the Lost Colony wherever they went. What they heard back - secondhand accounts, rumors passed through Indigenous intermediaries, and at least one deeply unsettling claim about what had ultimately happened to the survivors, would add an entirely new, and considerably darker, layer to a mystery that had already claimed White's family and consumed the better part of his life.
That's where the next chapter of this investigation picks up.
Read the Full Roanoke Investigation Series
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